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Titan Continues To Fascinate While Defying Speculation

How much is understood by scientists about Titan? There have been many instances where scientists never discover what they had predicted. The data defies long-age assumptions, thereby increasing the complexity within their framework rather than confirming it.

Saturn’s giant moon Titan keeps on revealing mysterious and fascinating discoveries. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finds a river on Titan comparable to that of the Nile river on earth. However, Titan is too cold (-179) to allow flowing water rather it’s ethane and methane which fill the lakes and streams on Titan.

“Coursing 400 kilometres towards a dark delta, a river found on Saturn’s moon Titan is the longest yet seen outside Earth. Bearing a striking resemblance to the Nile, the river hints at ongoing geological activity on the moon.”

“The Nile’s relatively straight shape is partly controlled by fault lines, which on Earth mark the places where tectonic plates meet. Titan is probably too small to have plates, but the river may also be tracing a fault in the bedrock, says Farr. Pressure could build up on such faults, causing them to shift and form new chasms and lakes, he says.”

It is interesting to note, even though scientists don’t believe Titan has plate tectonics, they do however believe the river tracks a fault line! Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? In another discovery found on Titan, the moon is icier than previous thought!

“Scientists have long suspected that a vast ocean of liquid water lies under the crust. The new study suggests that the internally generated heat that keeps that ocean from freezing solid depends far more on Titan’s interactions with Saturn and its other moons than had been suspected.”

“The picture of Titan that we get has an icy, rocky core with a radius of a little over 2,000 kilometers, an ocean somewhere in the range of 225 to 300 kilometers thick and an ice layer that is 200 kilometers thick,” he said.”

“Previous models of Titan’s structure estimated the icy crust to be approximately 100 kilometers thick. So if there is more ice, then there should be less heat from the core than had been estimated. One way to account for less heat being generated internally is for there to be less rock and more ice in the core than previous models had predicted.”

“From measurements of the observed gravitational field of Titan, one can compute what the shape of Titan ought to be. But the new data show that Titan’s shape is much more distorted than would be predicted by a simple gravitational model. That discrepancy means the internal structure of Titan isn’t quite so simple.”

Titan’s data conflicts with long-age assumptions, for example…Its lack of craters and the craters are shallow which is hard to believe using long-age assumptions considering the moon contains the most gravitational pull. Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, is a comparable size to Titan, but yet its craters are hundreds of meters bigger!

Next, there are dramatic changes happening in Titan’s atmosphere! Using an amazing instrument called the “Composite InfraRed Spectrometer”, a research team from the University of Bristol discovered “an enormous increase in Titan’s exotic trace gases over the south pole within a relatively short time.”

These gases are formed by sunlight, which then are converted by Titan’s atmosphere into benzene and hydrogen cyanide. The researchers were very surprised by this discovery considering such a rapid change within just a few short months. Why wouldn’t a circulation model predict activity even being relatively close to that high level? Well, it goes back again to the long-age assumption which prevails in secular science that bases everything on how things evolved. This discovery causes a problem for that assumption because they will have to invent something on how this erosive process could have been sustained over Titan’s presumed billions of years!

Another long-age problem was also discovered but more in-depth although questioning the age wasn’t discussed in this paper, it was just presumed to be very old! The rate of thermal escape of hydrogen from Titan’s upper atmosphere has been a dilemma. Researchers found that dissipation of hydrogen and methane is similar to Jeans escape, meaning that molecules escape the atmosphere based on their kinetic energy derived from temperature. The paper did suggest, “A global and temporal description is required to model Titan’s upper atmosphere.”

Every so often, one finds new papers which modified old papers that have been falsified such as the prediction of a global ocean being on Titan. A new model was invented and then presented in Icarus (which should be free) where they calculated (using only ratios, not bulk quantities) that surface liquids should be dominated by ethane (56%) over methane (32%), with much lower concentrations at the poles. This counters actual observations on Titan, where the only lakes found are at the poles!

Everyone can agree that observational raw data is vastly superior to invented speculation! We learn something about what is out there in space, we don’t really learn anything with speculative models other than they require fixing all the time to rescue the overall theory. But when you believe in a young universe, these amazing discoveries do not increase the complexity of that! One marvels on how Titan continues to confirm creationism, while defying secular speculation!

But when you believe in a young universe, these amazing discoveries do not increase the complexity of that!

This is certainly true. Magic is much less complex than science. Magic just is. No explanations required, no explanations possible. This is why creationism is so satisfying. Creationists do not have to feel bad that they can’t explain anything, because there is nothing to explain.

Suppose creationism ruled. Then disease is caused by demon magic, and no cures need be found. Volcanoes and earthquakes are magic, so they are impossible to predict or avoid. Birds fly because they have the power of flying. Whales can hold their breath for an hour because God made them that way. Consciousness is a magical gift, so it cannot be studied or analyzed—people do crazy things because they are crazy; they vote Republican because they are Republicans.

This exercise can become ridiculous in a hurry. Even Michael will admit that science can explain some things without resorting to magic.

But which things? Where is the boundary? Can science explain a long river on Titan, or is it magic? Does Titan’s distorted shape mean that scientific gravitation has failed, and we must look to magic for the shape of its orbit? Would a 200km ice layer require magic, but a 100 km layer (as previously thought) be caused by scientific processes? Why?

Another advantage of magic is that it resolves inconsistencies at the wave of a wand. For example—

Its lack of craters and the craters are shallow which is hard to believe using long-age assumptions considering the moon contains the most gravitational pull. Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, is a comparable size to Titan, but yet its craters are hundreds of meters bigger!

If the size of craters indicates age, then Titan is 6,000 years old, while its next-door neighbor, Ganymede,can seem to be 4.5 billion years old. NO PROBLEM! Magic resolves this conundrum with no increase in complexity whatever.

Creationist magic makes the world simple, and does not strain a limited understanding. Magic is a way of avoiding the complexities of the real world. Creationism is a foma, defined by Kurt Vonnegut as “harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls.”

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Michael’s post was cribbed from Creation Evolution Headlines, Titan Is as Titan Does, December 23. .By appropriating David Coppedge’s thoughts, opinions, and sources, Michael can avoid any complexity at all, and still seem to be knowledgeable. But we know better.

Not much new in the creationist blogs whence Michael gets all his material. Mostly end-of-year summaries.

David Coppedge sees evidence of design because red blood cells are shaped like human-designed Frisbees. Ho hum. He also claims that science is a tool of the Democratic party. (Of course it is. Republicans deny scientific evidence for political reasons. Duh.) ENV tries to revive the tired old link between Darwin and eugenics, and in another post is shocked to find that science perpetuates myths. AiG ends with their EOY summary.

Meanwhile, however, the evolutionist mill has questioned whether genomic phylogenetics is more accurate that fossil-based, or not. And found that one side of the Grand Canyon is millions of years older than the other side. And the issue of whether, when, and how much proto-human species interbred with each other is still hotly disputed.

Of course, the problem here is that Michael would have to read the original material, analyze it, and cast it into some semblance of English grammar. All of which are beyond his capabilities.